Well this is QUITE interesting...!

Well, today I learned some interesting things...

1. Adding an ability to a hero isn't quite what you expected. I expected to be able to add an ability on the hero, and the hero would be able to use skill points to increase the ability as he levels up. This ain't so. (This is old news)

2. The 3 new commands from the v1.17 beta patch will provide a work-able solution around that. You can add the abilities, and then have some kind of "trainer" to increase the abilities or decrease or set it to some level.

3. BUT, a hero (like in my game) that starts out with NO abilities mean that first, the skill points aren't even shown, and that more interestingly, as he levels up, he doesn't even GAIN any at all! No skills = no skill points.

4. Now this is very interesting! Supposedly you're only allowed 5 skills/spells on a hero. I managed to get 6.

So I have these problems, so lemme go into my work-around solution...

Basically, a hero in my game starts out with only ONE ability. It's called the "Show Available Skill Points" ability. It has 100 levels. Essentially, the player can invest 100 skill points into it, but it'll do absolutely nothing. (I chose 100, well because it's required in my game, but you could choose any number that suits you)

So now, the hero wants to learn a skilll, say, "storm bolt", which he can do so from the "Master of the warrior arts". This master sells "units" which when bought, will active a trigger, and depending on the unit bought, it will add that ability to the budding pupil - you - the hero.

I guess with v1.17, you can use the same master to upgrade your abilities. The trigger will see that you have the appropriate amount of skill points, and subtract when you upgrade your ability. This also means that you will not be able to level your abilities up anywhere at anytime. You'll have to find this master wherever he may be, and bug him.

Now, using this method, you can easily get 6 WORKING abilities. In my case, I had 5 working abilities and one bogus one. Simply request training of 5 abilities from the vaulted "Master of the warrior arts" and he will teach you in his wise and glorious ways. And he'll bore you to tears with his talk of some dragon and this stunningly hot blonde chick that wore this skimpy see-through dress with slits up to the hip and didn't seem cold aside from some obvious tips...er signs while being chained to a stump in the middle of winter up in some mountain peak. ...Sorry, I digress... YES, you can learn 5 abilities from the master, and also learn the "bogus" ability that was hardcoded into the hero. This "bogus" ability could be a working one or a non-working one, if you want, and it'll work (or not work).

So anyway, I had a few questions for those who actually made it this far. For those that are actually looking for the blonde chick, I appologize, she was dismayed to see how ugly the Master was, and decided to help the dragon run him away. The last I heard, they were happily living together somewhere. Kind of reminds you of Shrek. Kinda.

Anyhow:

1. If I upgrade to 1.17 (beta) and use the WE, will that cause any future problems? Perhaps going from 1.17 (beta) to official 1.17? I'm anxious to start using the 3 new ability commands, but I don't want to do a whole lot of work only to find out that the maps won't work anymore.

2. I'm fervently hoping, but I'm fairly sure it's not possible... but, is it not impossible to change hotkeys via triggers/JASS?

3. Oh, I forgot to mention. Creating an ability with 100 levels creates a pretty harsh 3-second lag (or more) when you create the hero within the game. Seems to be a loading-problem situation. However, I'm not sure what the impact would be if there were 20 heroes in a game. All with that "bogus" skill. Any thoughts on this?

4. Is it possible to make a store (or "trainer) accessible from anywhere on the map? It would be nice to be able to reference the trainer referencing the hero that wants to increase his abilities as GetBuyingUnit()).

Thanks!

1 i can only think of one problem you may have, if they add any triggers, they may do exactly what you tried to do now and youll have wasted a lot of work, but it should still work in 1.17 retail

2 i dont think its possible to change the hotkeys via jass or triggers

3 try and place a unit in your map witht he WE so it loads with the map, then delete it at initialization, this will make it load alll the abilites into memory when it loads

4 you could probaly make a modified version of "select hero" and give it like 999999 range, then give your heroes an ability to select that building (youd have to used triggers for that)

You could create a wisp for each player in an inaccessableregion of the map that were by the "trainer". This way you could just scroll over to him. Also, instead of a one hundred level ability, why not use lumber as skill points? You could make all the "abilities" cost one lumber. I hope this helps!

Well, you would be right of course, but unfortunately, I have already reserved the lumber for attribute points, Diablo style. =)

As it is, I made the level of the ability about 50, I might even reduce it to 40 or less. People should be using their skill points in this game, otherwise, well... you get the point.

I should be able to make the shop global as the triggers associated with it don't require the hero to be close. However, I'm still comtemplating it, in a game-dyanamics sort of way. I kind of like the idea of people having to weigh the options of going to the trainer to gain skills or to wait and continue leveling up and then later on, gaining the skills. Adds some strategy at least. Boots of speed will be of more use.

Thanks anyhow!

You could also use a variable to store skill points every time the Hero levels so you wouldn't need an ability.

I know... but I kind of wanted to keep the UI that wc3 provided for "available" skill points. In any case, it works nicely. There's a 5 skill limit anyway on each hero, and this 6th spell won't take up any space, etc. If having a 50 level spell proves to be cumbersome and lag-provoking then I'll simply have to use some other visual means to display the skill points while using a global integer array to store skill points.

have you seen verorian's engineering upgrade test map? it allows players to buy tomes of abilities and they will show up in the hero ability slots... no as a set ability.

also your hero will level and still recieve skill points, but there is no hero ability button if they havent bought or used a spell item.

it needs only 2 dummy abilities (for the basic hero)
- 1 with 3 levels, you give 3 of the same ability to the hero (coz normal heros have 3, 3 lvl abilities)
- 1 with 1 levels with a requirement of lvl 6, this will replicate the ultimate.

its a pretty good system, and it only requires 1 trigger that disables the dummy spells at the begining...

thats just my suggestion, but i highly recomend it for a spell system.